Apocryphicity

2019 SBL Diary: Day Two

December 5, 2019 by Tony

My second day at the 2019 SBL Annual Meeting began with the Journal of Biblical Literature editorial board breakfast meeting. If you ever submit a paper to the journal on the subject of Christian apocrypha, there’s a good chance I’m Reviewer 2. The discussion at the meeting focused on reducing the backload of submissions to the journal. But the really interesting talk was happening at my table. One person (who will not be named) mentioned to me that a certain scholar (who will not be named) was working on a complete version of an otherwise fragmentary apocryphal text (which will be named): the Gospel of Mary. The text is presently extant in an incomplete Coptic manuscript (the Berlin Codex) and two small Greek fragments. A complete text certainly would be a major contribution to work on this text, but some things about the rumor did not sound right. It is not out of the question that someone is working on this new manuscript, but probably not the person who was mentioned to me. Let’s hope there is some truth to the rumor.

Filled up on tea and pastries, I headed off to the first session of the Christian Apocrypha Section. The open session featured four papers on a variety of topics. Up first was Adeline Harrington (University of Texas at Austin) with “Apocryphal Oxyrhynchus: The Literary Landscape of a Late Antique City.” Harrington began with the statement by a late antique writer on Oxyrhynchus (I wish I could remember …

2019 SBL Diary: Day One

December 15, 2019 by Tony

Every year I sit down between grading papers to compile my thoughts and experiences from the SBL Annual Meeting. This process takes several days, so bear with me as I sift through my notes and memories and try to put together a useful and mildly entertaining overview of the event. The highlights include NASSCAL’s celebration of the debut of the Early Christian Apocrypha series, the night I was abandoned by a grad student on a boat, and the day another grad student stopped me on the street to give me edibles. One of those students can look forward to a lifetime of glowing reference letters and offers to collaborate, the other is dead to me.

My SBL experience began with travel, which can be fraught—flight delays, cancellations, encounters with customs and security. This year, travel went without much trouble. I chose a six am flight out of Hamilton, Ontario—closer to me and easier to navigate than Toronto’s Pearson airport. The early flight time was chosen for cost (it included a stop-over in Calgary) and because I wanted to arrive in plenty of time to set up for a NASSCAL reception celebrating the release of our premier volumes in the Early Christian Apocrypha series. As it happens, the executive later decided to move the reception to Saturday night. Ah well, it can’t hurt to get there early.

The plane touched down around 1 pm. I managed to find the bus to downtown (I swear they hide the affordable transit option so …

Apocryphal fragment from the Passion of Christ

November 19, 2019 by Tony

While poking around in some of the darker corners of Pinakes (the database of Greek manuscripts), I came across an untitled text listed only under the umbrella category of “Apocrypha Noui Testamenti.” It is a brief pericope found in the margin of a Vatican manuscript (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 875, fol. 286r; 13th cent.) at the end of the lexicon of John Zonaras, a twelfth-century chronicler and theologian from Constantinople. The Pinakes description is somewhat bare, but it is a little more detailed than the catalog of the collection by G. Cardinali: Inventari di manoscritti greci della Biblioteca Vaticana sotto il pontificato di Giulo II (1503–1513) (Studi e testi 491; Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolic Vaticana, 2015), p. 152. So there is little information about the pericope beyond what is found in the manuscript, as presented below.

A preliminary translation, based on the emendations above, is as follows:

The crowds <were> holding Christ in their midst. A certain youth came in secret behind Jesus and struck him. Then the others testing, asked him, “Tell us, then, who of the people secretly hit you since you do not know. Prophesy and say and show us from the crowd the one who hit you and we will know that you are a prophet and you know everything.

The pericope is a retelling of the following episode from the Synoptic Gospels:

The pericope is closer in form to the versions in Matthew and Luke, in which the crowds ask Jesus “Who is it …

Christian Apocrypha Books to Look for at 2019 SBL

November 19, 2019 by Tony

One of the highlights of the SBL Annual Meeting is the publishers exhibition. As you make your way from one booth to another, keep an eye out for these new books dealing with apocryphal texts and contexts. If there is a book missing in the lists, please pass along the details.

Additions to the list:

Bloomsbury

Chris Keith, Helen K. Bond, and Jens Schröter, eds. The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries. 3 vols.

SBL Press

Janet E. Spittler, ed. The Narrative Self in Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Judith Perkins. WGRWSup 15.

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Baylor

Philip Esler. Ethiopian Christianity: History, Theology, Practice.

Bloomsbury

Matthew Crawford and Nicola J. Zola, eds. The Gospel of Tatian: Exploring the Nature and Text of the Diatessaron. Bloomsbury, 2019.

Ingvild Saelid Gilhus, Alexandros Tsakos, and Marta Camilla Wright. The Archangel Michael in Africa: History, Cult and Persona.

Brepols

E. Créghur, J. C. Dias Chaves, and S. Johnston, eds. Christianisme des Origines: Mélanges en l’honneur du Professeur Paul-Hubert Poirier.

Brill

David Bertaina, ed. Heirs of the Apostles: Studies on Arabic Christianity. Studies on Arabic Christianity in Honor of Sidney H. Griffith.

David Hamidovic, Claire Clivaz, and Sarah Bowen Savant, eds. Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture: Visualisation, Data Mining, Communication.

Edmondo F. Lupieri, ed. Mary Magdalene from the New Testament to the New Age and Beyond.

Einar Thomassen and Christoph Markschies, eds. Valentinianism: New Studies.

Lorne Zelyck. The Egerton Gospel (Egerton Papyrus 2 + Papyrus Köln VI 255): Introduction, Critical Edition, …

Christian Apocrypha at SBL 2019

October 27, 2019 by Tony

The 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature takes place November 23–26 in sunny San Diego, California. To help prepare for the event, I have compiled all of the presentations focusing on Christian Apocrypha, this time with abstracts (since they tend to vanish from the SBL site soon after the conclusion of the meeting). See you in San Diego.

1. Christian Apocrypha Section sessions:

S24-119 Christian Apocrypha (9:00 AM to 11:30 AM)
Theme: The Christian Apocrypha in Material Culture and Art
Brent Landau, University of Texas at Austin, Presiding

Adeline Harrington, University of Texas at Austin: “Apocryphal Oxyrhynchus: The Literary Landscape of a Late Antique City”

Recent scholarship on Christian apocrypha has made a decisive turn away from dichotomous models that present a stark discontinuity between the diverse, often ‘heretical’, literary practices of the early church and the canonical, authoritarian late antique church. As we have seen, apocryphal writings continued to be widely produced, copied, and distributed across the Mediterranean throughout antiquity. It is significant, however, that a large number of our earliest apocryphal (and canonical) Christian texts come from a single city: Oxyrhynchus. Our manuscript evidence from this city is often isolated from its original Oxyrhynchite context, as has been long noted by scholars like Eldon Epp. This paper sits within a larger dissertation project on the Christian literary culture in Oxyrhynchus. Focusing on the apocryphal material within the city, I trace the local trends in apocryphal production diachronically, paying special attention to manuscripts dated from the …

“Acts” of John and Philip in the Miracle of St. Michael the Archangel at Chonae

September 6, 2019 by Tony

The Archangel Michael is one of the most important of the Christian saints—second only to the Virgin Mary in prominence in late antique and medieval Christianity, both in the East and the West. Holy sites dedicated to the saint are spread out all over the Christian world; one of the most prominent is the island of Mont St. Michel in Normandy, built in the eighth century. Pilgrims would come to these sites for healing, typically from contact with a spring or fountain—given that the saint was incorporeal, contact with relics was not an option. Such veneration of Michael is surprising given that the New Testament forbids angel worship (Col 2:18; Rev 22:8-9).

Michael rarely appears in canonical texts (see Dan 10:13, 21 and 12:1; Jude 9; Rev 12:7-9) but he is prominent in apocryphal texts, particularly tour-of-hell apocalypses, where he is depicted as interceding with God on behalf of humans. The most lengthy of the Michael apocrypha is the Coptic Investiture of the Archangel Michael, in which the risen Jesus tells his apostles about the creation of the angels and the fall of humanity, and the Encomium on the Archangel Michael, in which Prochorus, the disciple of John, relates Michael’s explaination to him about how he annually rescues sinners from damnation. Similar material is related in a Greek text known as the Homily of John Chrysostom on How Archangel Michael Defeated Satanail. But there is another Michael text that does not get included in discussions of apocrypha, …

Four Uncatalogued Apocrypha Manuscripts from Mount Sinai

September 6, 2019 by Tony

Update: the National Library of Israel responded to my query about the origins of their manuscript images. They were part of the same photographing initiative as the Library of Congress, though the library gave the date of this enterprise as 1968, not 1949–1950.

The St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai is well-known as a goldmine of manuscripts—almost 2300 of them in Greek alone, and another 1000 or so in other languages. Its library has yielded such treasures as the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Syriacus, along with a number of important manuscripts of apocryphal texts. And it seems to keep giving. In 1975 a number of new leaves and fragments—the so-called “New Finds”—were discovered during the renovation of the tower in the monastery’s north wall. And new technology is being used by the Sinai Palimpsests Project to read the underwriting of reused manuscripts. Recently I made some “new finds” of my own when looking for digitized manuscripts for the NASSCAL project Manuscripta apocryphorum.

The Sinai manuscripts were catalogued in piecemeal fashion in the late nineteenth century. A full list of all the manuscripts, prior to the New Finds, was completed by Murad Kamil in 1970. But this is not a catalogue with full descriptions of each item; Kamil gives only a few lines of information, often describing the manuscripts as simply “Theological Treatises” or “Lives of Saints.”

In 1949–1950 a group of organizations and private scholars joined together to perform a full-scale examination of the monastery’s holdings. The Library of …

Years in the Making: The Debut of NASSCAL’s Early Christian Apocrypha Series

July 12, 2019 by Tony

The North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL) is celebrating the release of the first two volumes in their Early Christian Apocrypha series: The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary, by Brandon W. Hawk, and The Protevangelium of James, by Lily C. Vuong. To be clear, the two books are numbered volumes 7 and 8 because NASSCAL is continuing a series that was begun by Julian V. Hills, who edited six volumes of texts for Polebridge Press.

The process of getting these two books to publication began in 2015. NASSCAL had been formed a year earlier and the directors were considering options for publishing projects that could be venues for the work of our members. The first volume of the More New Testament Apocrypha series was near completion, and though it is not explicitly a NASSCAL project, many of its contributors were NASSCAL members. MNTA focuses on texts that are not normally included in apocrypha collections, but we had members of the society interested in working on some of the “standard” apocryphal texts—such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Apocalypse of Peter. We looked at the work of the French and Swiss apocrypha group l’AELAC (Association pour l’Étude de la Littérature Apocryphe Chrétienne), who publish a series of pocket-size translations called La collection de poche apocryphes. But there already existed a North American pocketbook series of apocrypha in English.

Westar, the association behind the Jesus Seminar, have a number …

Book Review ~ The Other Side: Apocryphal Perspectives on Ancient Christian “Orthodoxies”

June 21, 2019 by Tony

With the “Beyond Canon” conference at the Universität Regensburg approaching in a few weeks (July 2–5; details HERE), I thought this might be a good time to finally write my review of the essay collection, The Other Side: Apocryphal Perspectives on Ancient Christian “Orthodoxies” (edited by Tobias Nicklas, Candida R. Moss, Christopher Tuckett, and Joseph Verheyden; NTOA 117; Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2017; publisher details HERE). The conference is organized by The Other Side editor and contributor Tobias Nicklas and some of the papers take up themes from the collection. The review has been on my to-do list for a long time, delayed in part due to my initial notes on the book going missing. But I went back to it this week and can now present my thoughts on it.

Most of the essays were originally presented at a conference in London, under the auspices of the University of Notre Dame, 3–5 July 2014. The exception is a paper by John Carey (“The Reception of Apocryphal texts in Medieval Ireland,” pp. 251–69) that originated as a plenary lecture at the “International Symposium on Christian Apocryphal Literature: Ancient Christian literature and Christian Apocrypha” in Thessaloniki, 27 June 2014. No explanation is given in the introduction for this outlier; indeed, very little information is provided in the introduction at all, and the few pages that are here seem to be repurposed from a publishing proposal for the book (at one point it states “the proposed volume…”). Nevertheless, some context …

Reconstructing a Ninth-Century Arabic Apocrypha Manuscript from Mount Sinai

August 17, 2020 by Tony

Though I have a number of important projects in progress at the moment, sometimes I throw them aside for a day or two while I chase down some information about an apocryphal text or manuscript. Yesterday was one of those days. So I don’t lose track of what I’ve learned, I thought I would compile it all in a blog post—and since my last blog pose was in February, I can justify this diversion as necessary for maintaining my social media presence, right?

My morning began by posting the latest entry in NASSCAL’s e-Clavis: the Six-Books Dormition of the Virgin, compiled for us by Alley Kateusz. The 6 Bks. Dorm. is extant in Syriac (CANT 123 and 124), Arabic (140), and Ethiopic (150). The Arabic text was published from a manuscript in Bonn in 1854 by Maximilian Enger (Ionnis Apostoli de Transitu Beatae Mariae Virginis Liber). Enger’s edition includes also a Latin translation, which was translated into French a few years later in Jacques-Paul Migne’s Dictionnaire des Apocryphes. Enger’s text was reprinted in Pilar González Casado’s doctoral thesis (“Las relaciones linguisticas entre el siriaco y el arabe en textos religiosos arabes cristianos”; Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2013) along with a Spanish translation. So, what is the problem that I needed to solve? Casado states in her introduction that Enger’s source is a ninth-century manuscript from Bryn Mawr College Library (p. 6), but later correctly identifies the source as the manuscript from Bonn (p. 181).

What is …

More New Testament Apocrypha vol. 3

February 27, 2019 by Tony

In January I submitted the completed manuscript of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures volume 2 to the publisher, Eerdmans. I was soon informed that the volume was too large. The first volume is around 600 pages; the second is close to 700. Eerdmans want some uniformity to the series and asked to reduce the book by 100 pages. As a consolation, they promised that the excised material could appear in a third volume. Additional volumes were always a possibility but were contingent on the success of the first two. Eerdmans seems to be confident enough in the series for it to continue.

But what texts do I cut? Some of our contributors are in the early stages of their careers; it is far more important for their work to be published sooner rather than later. Several of us with multiple texts in the volume volunteered to hold off on some of our work and a few other contributors agreed to wait for volume 3. But I don’t want people to wait long, so I spent the past few weeks working with our past contributors to put together a preliminary list of texts to fill the third volume. This is what we came up with:

The Apocryphon of Jesus’ Baptism (Ostracon Aberdeen 25)
The Acts of Andrew and Paul
The Acts of Andrew and Philemon
The Acts of John by Prochorus
The Acts of John in the City of Rome
The Acts of Mark
The Acts of Peter in the …

Reflections on the Material of Christian Apocrypha Conference: Part II

December 22, 2018 by Tony

Day two of the “Material of Christian Apocrypha” conference was all about the Great White North as the Canadians took over the podium. First up was Jean-Michel Roessli (Concordia University) with “The Tiburtine Sibyl and the Legend of the Aracoeli, aka the Vision of Augustus.” The Tirburtine Sibyl is not a widely known text, but, in Stephen Shoemaker’s words, for medieval Christians its “influence on Christian eschatology far outweighed that of the Apocalypse of John” (MNTA 1:513). It is one of a number of texts—including the Legend of Aphroditianus and a few excerpts I am working on from the Syriac Sayings of Greek Philosophers—that demonstrate knowledge of Christ’s birth or death among people in the wider Greco-Roman world. The focus of Roessli’s paper is a tradition in which the Sibyl is asked by the emperor Augustus who will succeed him and he is told of a “Hebrew child, God ruling over the blessed.” John Malalas (491–578) may be the earliest witness to this tradition; his Chronography (X.5) features the same exchange but adds that Augustus set up an altar (the Ara coeli) in the bedchamber of his palace on the Capitoline on which is written “This is the altar of the first-born God.” Later a basilica was built on the site, known today as the Basilica di Santa Maria in Ara coeli al Campidoglio.

Other writers mention the oracle and the location of the altar, but most significant is a development made prior to the time of …

Reflections on the Material of Christian Apocrypha Conference: Part I

December 22, 2018 by Tony

The “Material of Christian Apocrypha” conference took place at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville November 30 and December 1, 2018 (see the conference web site HERE). The event also doubled as the first meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Christian Apocryphal Literature (NASSCAL). It was organized by Janet Spittler (at the time Vice-President of NASSCAL) and her UVA colleague Fotini Kondyli. I have been asked by the editors of the journal Apocrypha to write a report on the conference. This blog post, and another to follow, are draft work towards completing that report but the posts will have a bit of a personal focus, highlighting what I found to be of interest to my own research and teaching interests. Many of the participants are active Twitter users, tweeting before, during, and after the event. Janet helpfully combined all of their efforts at this Wakelet compilation.

To start, I have to compliment Janet and Fotini on organizing a truly excellent and rewarding conference. I learned something from every paper. For past conferences (for SBL or the York Symposia), we have often considered visual topics—such as art, illuminations, and iconography—but have not been successful in attracting enough participants who work in the area. But the theme of this gathering was expansive enough to make it work and allowed for a broad range of approaches and conversation between scholars not only of Christian apocrypha, but also Medievalists, Byzantinists, scholars who work on Syriac and Coptic literature, and …

2018 SBL Diary: Day Three

December 21, 2018 by Tony

A busy day 3 began with a NASSCAL executive breakfast in our swanky hotel lounge (we had to smuggle a few of the exec. in; this is what happens when you give the hoi polloi something nice—we just take advantage). The NASSCAL board was about to change over after the Material of Christian Apocrypha conference in Charlottesville, so I gave my final update as President on the status of our various projects—including e-Clavis (with over 80 entries now completed) and the Early Christian Apocrypha series (the first two books are now in the hands of their new publisher: Wipf & Stock)—and we discussed possibilities for a second NASSCAL conference in Austin in 2020.

The first panel on my schedule for the day was the joint session of the Christian Apocrypha and Religious Competition in Late Antiquity sections. Jacob A. Lollar (Florida State University) started things off with “What Has Ephesus to Do with Edessa? The Syriac History of John, the Cult of the Dea Syria, and Religious Competition in Fourth-Century Syria.” The History of John has received little interest in scholarship, in part because of its (likely) language of composition (there still aren’t enough of us able to work in Syriac) and because it is considered secondary to the earlier Acts of John in Greek. Nevertheless, the text has some interesting qualities, not least is the fact that its story is told in Ephesus (and the author seems to know the city well) yet, Lollar believes, it was composed in …

2018 SBL Diary: Day Two

November 28, 2018 by Tony

The second day of the annual meeting was significantly more relaxed. There were no Christian Apocrypha Section sessions scheduled, so I was “free” to go to anything that interested me. But before the sessions began, I attended the Journal of Biblical Literature editorial board breakfast meeting. I joined the board last year to review apocrypha-related submissions. It’s a surprisingly large group but run like clockwork by General Editor Adele Reinhartz, though she is stepping down now after many years in the role to be replaced by Mark Brett. I sat down next to Mark Goodacre (Duke University) and we talked about what we were presenting on. I began explaining my paper from day 1 by saying, “It’s an eighteenth-century manuscript containing apocryphal texts that no-one really knows anything about.” When I was finished, Mark said, “I thought you having me on for a second there.” I didn’t realize how much my description sounded like the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark, a text that both Mark and I are interested in but disagree completely about its authenticity (I do not believe the theory that it is a forgery, created by its discoverer, Morton Smith; Mark refuses to see reason).

After breakfast, I hustled over to the Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship session, which focused on the Museum of the Bible. I have been following the steady stream of criticism about the museum that began even before it opened, and enjoyed Candida Moss’s and Joel Baden’s investigation of it in …